Don't Save Anything: The Uncollected Writings of James Salter(23)
The afternoon is fading. The light on the river is stilled. Berry is reflecting. He thinks, perhaps, of the America which lies beyond the cities, which seems to be shrinking but which, when one enters it, is as endless as the sea.
“There are still a lot of Hattiesburgs around the country,” he says.
People
September 2, 1974
Ike the Unlikely
He possessed, like his boss, an invincible smile. The era had two of them. Roosevelt’s was the hail of a champion. Ike’s, they say, was worth twenty divisions.
Generals never smile. That was only one of the rules he broke. MacArthur didn’t smile. Bradley either, it wasn’t his nature—besides, his teeth were false. Ike smiled all the way, and his smile was instant and true. Even de Gaulle, a man not easily taken in, was impressed by him and sensed both generosity and warmth.
He never really commanded like Napoleon or Grant. “He let his generals in the field fight the war for him,” MacArthur commented disdainfully, while “he drank tea with kings and queens.” In an even more acidic mood he described him as the “best clerk I ever had.”
We see the grand MacArthur striding through the surf onto the shore of the Philippines, fulfilling his pledge, trouser legs soaked, weathered hat on his head, the legendary figure who fought back from stunning defeat across a battlefield that was an ocean so vast that men’s perceptions could barely cross it and who even after victory did not return home but chose to remain in Tokyo as proconsul and govern the shattered Japanese. He did it magnificently and with remarkable discernment, knowing it would be the capstone of a great career. While poor Eisenhower, whose dream of the future was merely a quiet cottage, had to oversee the demobilization, accepted the presidency of Columbia, for which he was ill-suited, recovered his poise to some extent in command of NATO, and finally lifting his head to the shouts was swept to the presidency by an adoring public. Thus the farm boy and the last of the aristocrats.
He was born in obscurity in northern Texas, one of seven children, all boys, in a family that always had to struggle and soon moved back to Kansas. From his mother Eisenhower inherited his chin, high forehead, and steady gaze. She was a hardworking, honest, no-nonsense woman, a pacifist who eventually became a Jehovah’s Witness. “He that conquereth his own soul is greater than he who taketh a city,” she told her son.
It was 1890, bread cost three cents a loaf. The plains were still crude and raw, the railroad the sole connection with the rest of the world. He was born into a home where the Bible was read daily, into a town that still lived by the frontier ethic, and into a world where man’s temporal role could be summed up in one word: work. As a boy he grew vegetables behind the house and sold them. He worked in the Belle Springs Creamery, where his father was also employed, after school. Together with his brother he tried to earn enough money so that one of them could go to college, the other to follow afterward. Years later he was asked by someone if he was really a conservative. “Any of you fellows ever grow up working on a farm?” he asked.
At the urging of a friend, he took the exam for Annapolis and for West Point too while he was at it. It turned out he was too old for the naval academy, but the first man for West Point failed the physical and Eisenhower got the appointment. He arrived in June 1911. He had come mainly for a free education. Here he is, making his first, brief appearance as a running back for Army: sandy hair, five feet eleven inches, stocky, called Ike by his classmates. As a measure of his indistinguishability, there were four other “Ikes” in the class. There were also nicknames like Nigger, Jew, Dago, and Chink. It was the class of 1915, the class they later said “the stars fell on.” In what could pass for a gentleman’s world, a backwater world as was the army it fed into, they rode horses, studied geology, engineering, natural philosophy, and hygiene, and pitched tents for the summer at the far end of the Plain. It was a closed world that held a certain comradeship and mystery.
He did not seem destined for greatness. Academically he was only average. He was not one of the cadet pantheon; neither was Bradley. He was well enough liked, confident, breezy. He preferred poker to dancing, and his classmates noted that he was fond of shooting the bull.
Caught up in the rising swell of the First World War, he was given training assignments and rose to become lieutenant colonel on his twenty-eighth birthday, but the war ended and he had suffered the classic grief of young officers—he had not seen action. The army quickly shrank. Everyone was demoted. He reverted to the rank of captain and together with Mamie vanished down the dusty roads that led to routine and remote posts—Leavenworth, Camp Meade, Fort Benning—while Jimmy Walker, Lindbergh, and Babe Ruth strode the stage. Lingering behind him, like a faint epitaph, was the opinion of one of his instructors at West Point who, like the others, had found him unremarkable: “We saw in Eisenhower a not uncommon type, a man who would thoroughly enjoy his army life . . .” But not much besides.
The most important group in the United States Army of the ’20s and ’30s was Pershing’s men, the officers who had found his favor either before or during the war. George Marshall, who had been in his headquarters in France, was one. Douglas MacArthur, though he had performed brilliantly as a troop commander, a dashing and gallant figure right out of Journey’s End rising to become the youngest brigadier general in the army, was not. He was too vivid, too pushy, too iconoclastic. He and Marshall never liked each other. They had much in common—both were aloof, puritanical, driven. Marshall, however, had hardly a single watt of military glory. It was the “loftiness and beauty of his character” that stood out, as Dean Acheson noted. MacArthur was not without character, but the thing that shone so unmistakably from him was ambition.